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Preserving Communication Context 223

design of CSCW and groupware in Japan, acknowledge cultural ef-
fects in implementation and use. Some major Japanese companies
are now selling workflow systems developed by American companies,
but this is problematic. In the words of another leading researcher,
the biggest challenge facing Japanese groupware is “attaining wide-
spread use. Managers don’t want to change the way they work. They
want to be able to consult with people as they usually do.”
How does this desire to reflect cultural particularities play out
in practice?

TeamWorkStation/Clearboard (NTT HUMAN INTERFACE Labs)
Our first example, TeamWorkStation, is one of the earliest and most
documented Japanese CSCW projects. It has been widely cited
within the CSCW community and has inspired considerable re-
search within Japan around the concepts of seamlessness and gaze
awareness. Ishii and his collaborators at NTT Human Interface
Labs were neither the first to develop the concept of a seamless work
environment, nor the first to explore peripheral awareness. Both
were borrowed from work done originally at Xerox PARC. But the
Japanese way of dealing with these issues is unique, and the pro-
gression from TeamWorkStation I to TWS II to ClearFace to Clear-
Board is illustrative of incremental development of research
intuitions as well the resolution of technical problems.
TeamWorkStation (TWS) is “a desktop real-time shared work-
space” which integrates both computer and desktop workspaces.
Starting from the premise that “no new piece of technology should
block the potential use of already existing tools and methods” (Ishii
and Miyake 1991, 39), the team set out to design a system that
would allow users to maintain their preferred work practices, using
their preferred computer applications, or even working with pencil
and paper within a shared virtual workspace. Acknowledging that
people might not do everything by computer and supporting their
continued use of paper-based media were revolutionary concepts in
CSCW at the time.
A second design requirement was a shared drawing surface. The
research team chose video as the basic media of TWS for its ability
to fuse traditionally incompatible media such as papers and com-
puter files (Ishii and Miyake 1991, 39). Live video image synthesis
was employed to capture individual workspaces (both computer
screens and physical desktops) and to display them in separate lay-
ers on a computer monitor. The overlay function created with this